What is Harness-as-a-Service (HaaS)?

Harness-as-a-Service is a hosted harness any agent signs into. Tools, auth, memory, budgets and an audit trail come as one service, and the agent you run stays yours.

Illustration: A small friendly robot with a round camera-eye head sits in a simple cart harness pulled by nothing, the harness neatly holding a toolbox, a notebook, a coin jar and a key ring on hooks.

Harness-as-a-Service is a hosted harness that any agent signs into. The harness is everything around the model: the tools it can call, the auth behind them, the memory it keeps, the budget it may spend and the record of what it did. The model reasons. The harness decides what the agent can reach, on whose behalf, and with what limits.

The model reasons, the harness decides reach
Every agent needs tokens, memory, a budget and a log. A hosted harness keeps one copy that every agent signs into.
Before: a harness per agent
Claude Code
on a laptop
Slack token: can post to the public channel
Memory: last week's decision
Codex
in CI
Slack token: cannot post there
Memory: nothing
A bot you built
your own loop
Tokens: its own copies
Budget and log: its own, or none
After: one hosted harness
The agents you run, one sign-in each
Claude Code
on a laptop
Codex
in CI
A bot you built
your own loop
Your org on CoreSpeed
api.corespeed.io/mcp
Connectorstokens in custodyslack__post_message
ApprovalsAllow, Ask or Deny for writes
Memoryshared or privatememory__search_memory
Budgetscredits, a cap per key
Activityone ledger, one trail
The loop stays yours. The harness decides what it reaches, on whose behalf, and with what limits.

What is a harness?

An agent is a model in a loop with tools. The loop and the tools are the harness: the code that presents a tool list, carries credentials, executes a call, feeds the result back, remembers across sessions, counts cost and writes a log. Claude Code is a harness. Codex is a harness. A bot built on an SDK is a harness you wrote.

Every one of those harnesses needs the same parts. Each needs a token for Slack, a token for GitHub, a way to refresh them, a memory store, a budget and a log. When a team runs several agents, each harness grows its own copy, and the copies drift. One agent can post to the public channel; another cannot. One has last week's decision in memory; another has nothing.

Why did the leverage move to the harness?

Models are available to everyone through an API. Two teams calling the same model get the same reasoning. What differs is what the agent can reach, what it knows at the start of a session, what it is allowed to spend, and whether anyone can reconstruct what happened. Those are harness properties.

That makes the harness the place where an agent becomes safe to run for a team. A model with no tools can do nothing. A model with every token in its process can do anything, and the first prompt injection decides what. The harness in between is where scope, custody and limits live.

What does a hosted harness include?

CoreSpeed describes the long-term idea as an operating system for agents. The analogy maps cleanly.

Operating systemHosted harnessIn CoreSpeed
DriversConnectors: the apps an agent can act throughnotion__create_page, slack__post_message, github__create_pull_request
PermissionsApprovals: which writes a person decidesSmart Approval, a plain-English policy, three verdicts
FilesystemMemory: state that outlives a sessionmemory__remember, memory__search_memory, shared or private
QuotasBudgets: what an agent may spendCredits, an org wallet threshold, a monthly cap per key
System logActivity: who did what, with which outcomeDashboard → Activity, joined to one ledger
Users and service accountsPrincipals: members and agentsBrowser sign-in, sk-cs- member keys, sk-csa- agent keys

The unit of ownership is the organization. Connections, memory, budgets, policy and the trail live in the org, and every agent a member runs reaches them through one sign-in. Built-in capabilities ride along: media generation and understanding, live web search and page reading, public social data, and the org's own MCP servers as org__ tools. Introducing CoreSpeed tells the story from the founders' side.

How does an agent sign into a hosted harness?

Over MCP. CoreSpeed is one remote MCP server, https://api.corespeed.io/mcp, over Streamable HTTP. A client with a browser signs in with OAuth; a headless client sends an API key. For Claude Code, the setup is one command:

claude mcp add corespeed https://api.corespeed.io/mcp --transport http --scope user

Or give the agent the line set up https://corespeed.io/SKILL.md in chat. It fetches the skill, adds the server at user scope, signs you in, keeps the skill and asks which apps to connect. After that, tools/list returns what this caller may call, and every call carries the org's spend caps, lands in one ledger and is recorded in the trail. The MCP server docs cover Codex, Cursor, Copilot in VS Code, OpenClaw, Hermes, claude.ai and ChatGPT.

What does a hosted harness not do?

It does not run your agent. CoreSpeed equips the agent you already run, on your laptop, in CI, or as a job you operate elsewhere. The loop stays yours; the harness provides what the loop reaches.

It sees only the calls routed through it. A local MCP server, a shell command or a direct HTTP call from your own code never passes the gate, the meter or the trail. And memory enforces nothing: it is context, while policy lives in approvals and budgets.

FAQ

Is Harness-as-a-Service the same as an agent framework?

A framework is code you run to build the loop. A hosted harness is a service the loop signs into for tools, auth, memory, budgets and audit. You can use both.

Do I have to replace Claude Code or Codex?

No. Each member keeps their client. The client registers one MCP server and signs in.

Does CoreSpeed host or schedule my agent?

No. You run the agent. CoreSpeed provides what it reaches and records what it does.

What does it cost to start?

A first browser sign-in creates your organization on its first tool call, with 3,000 free credits that expire 90 days after the grant and no card required. Memory operations and tools/list are free per call. Rates are on pricing.